Chain Reactions

There are two things that I like about this picture. The most obvious is the reason for taking the picture in the first place. What’s not to like about a picture of a dog biting a cat?

But there is more to the picture than meets the eye. For instance, why is the dog biting the cat?

To know the answer to that question, you would have had to be walking the streets of Saigon’s Cong Ly slums on a muggy afternoon in 1971, and see what I saw a split second before this picture was taken.<

Founding Fathers vs Funding Fathers

The one thing that the founding fathers and funding fathers have in common is that we owe them a lot.

We know most but not all of the founding fathers by name—Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, and Hamilton—a veritable who’s who of who’s in our pockets.

We know some but certainly not all of the funding fathers but we do know the names of our political leaders—everyone of them most certainly with their hands in the funding father’s pockets.

The founding fathers are remembered both for what they did and for what they said because back then what you said and what you did was mostly the same thing.

Waiting For the Lima Bean

Waiting for something to happen is the running theme in Hell on Earth, a love story. Hank was sent down to become a newspaper writer and in the end no amount of waiting was going to see that goal reached. On the subject of waiting, this story was written a quarter of a century ago and has also been waiting to see the light of day.

This story could easily be called, “The lima bean that never came” but that title hints at a rather sad ending and besides we don’t know that it never came. No this is simply a story about waiting and although waiting never comes easily “Waiting for the Lima Bean” is a much better title and a much nicer thought.

People wait for all kind of things to happen. They wait impatiently everyday for their mail to arrive—anticipating that special letter that will somehow make that day special. Of course, that letter rarely shows up. That is the definition of ordinary. Ordinary is what happens while we are waiting for the extraordinary. It can’t be any other way but that doesn’t make it any easier to swallow. The hardest thing to wait for is results.